Davrin - Official Companion Thread [Spoilers]

They'll likel yfall in love assuming you don't make a mov eon one o fthe mfirst.

When I read people say "not another Warden", I think "how about an actual Warden this time" ?

I don't really echo the reluctance towards quippy smartass characters - I think tropes and clichees exist for a reason. They are bad, if they're bad - but I think we've had enough "but not really"-type members of any Thedas faction.

An actual proud Warden who's established in the order would be a novelty. And whatever person he is beyond that.

I noticed that the Grey Wardens summary on the EA website, they have them listed as fighting both darkspawn and monsters. I'm not sure if that's something they'll expand on in game because I don't think they were ever described as monster hunters in previous games, were they?

Am I the only one worried about the health and safety of Assan, our baby Giffon, and all the Griffons?
I think it's a fair assumption that Ghilan'nain had a hand in their creation. And what do most evil geniuses have for their creations? A backdoor to subvert or terminate them should they defy orders. She spared the "monsters of the air" as a gift to Andruil, add their hatred of Darkspawn and tainted creatures it makes a great deal of sense for Griffons to be another of her creations.

Sometime I feel like BioWare in the attempt of making non-stereotipical for their factions characters end up making charaters that are way too much "not like other mages/templars/Wardens/elves/dwarves etch..." and sometimes this feel grating. At least, for me it is quite annoyng from time to time. We still haven't got a "real templar" in our ranks, we still haven't got a decent City Elf character, or a decent Orzamarr Dwarf (that is not a caricature of a tragic alcholic played for laught with the depth of a puddle for more than a dlc). Hopeful Davrin is an actual interesting Gray Warden, and not an elf character only because he have pointy ears that try in every way to reduce his own background or reject it.

Very much agreed. I think Sera is probably the main character I think suffers them most of this sort of writing(which again is why I'm hoping it's not Lukas writing Davrin this time), because she ends up being so inconsistent in her motives and beliefs that it ends up hurting her character. I'll even take Davrin or Bellara being a city elf who joined a clan later on in life, possibly a reverse of Merrill's situation, if it has to come to that. But the "outlier" characters who dislike or are indifferent to the people/faction they represent has ran it's course by now, lol.

If Davrin's vallaslin is Ghilan'nain rather than June and Ghilan'nain really did make Griffin's then that could make facing her with him interesting.

Well, it's been... How many years since the Last Flight events? I think I remember it was around the start of Inquisition, with the mage/Templar war as background. How is the Griffon restoration going? Roughly a decade could have been enought to have the eggs found in the book became full adult Griffon and started breeding?

We don't actually know how long griffons are meant to live. It could take many years for them to reach maturity even if they could breed at an earlier stage. To give any example, horses do not fully mature physically until 5 years of age, although they are capable of mating from as early as one year (for the colts), although fillies do not tend to conceive until 2 years old at the earliest. Horses live for 20-30 years, longer in captivity than in the wild. Elephants do not become sexually mature until around 10 years of age at the earliest, so I imagine it takes this long to reach physical maturity as well. They live for between 40-50 years in the wild. On the other hand lions are sexually mature at around 5 years and can live as long as 25 years in captivity (shorter in the wild because of the dangers that lead to premature death). As griffons are a hybrid, likely magical constructs, it is hard to say whether their lifespan would be shorter or longer but it can be seen from this that it is conceivably possible that they might only be achieving physical and sexual maturity 10 years after they were hatched.   On the whole the bigger the creature the longer it takes to mature and adult griffons are large enough to carry a rider in flight.

The problem with restoring the species is that there were only 13 of them and they are all brothers and sisters so any offspring would be very inbred. So, they would have to allow enough time to see if there were any physical problems that might be passed on with indiscriminate breeding and pair up the various individuals accordingly in order to offset this.

I'd say that it's hard to say what will be their fate, especially that we don't know how will the world look like after all the magical shenanigans (I'm of a mind that even if we manage to guard the Veil, the world will change in some important ways anyway), but considering that in Inquisition one of our companions was literally a spirit that can turn into a fully formed human, it's likely that spirits can take a lesser physical form as well.

I imagine that Davrin at least has been with them for some time or he would not have been entrusted with one of the precious young griffons. The only exception would be if he had been specifically recruited from the Dalish to care for the griffons but in that case he would probably have been with them at least 10 years since that is how old the griffons are.